VLVL2 (12): "Wackiness" Summary and Annotations (part 3)

[Tim Strzechowski]

Continuing:
p. 226 "Dr Elasmo's video image had swept, had pixeldanced in"   Image/raster TV techotalk. Pixels = the tiny dots that make up the Tube image.

p. 227 "Dr. Larry Elasmo, or a person wearing, like a coverall and veil, his ubiquitous screen image grainy, flickering at the edges..."   So not only is the real Elasmo tracking Weed, his TV image is doing it too!

p. 228 "Ilse, the hygienist..."    Naturally, the dental hygienist in Larry's World of Discomfort is none other than Ilse, the high-heeled Nazi heroine of sixties S&M porno flicks, e.g., Ilse, She-Wolf of the SS.

p. 230 "...adjusted the pulsing vacuum to meet his own quickening rhythm..."   The scene of Rex adjusting Bruno's carburetors while masturbating in the intakes clearly harks back to certain intimate moments involving Rachel and her MG's gearshift lever in V.

p. 230 "Trash the Xanthocroid"    (See note, p. 197.) 

p. 232 "...smile and relax beneath some single low oak out on an impossible hillside..."   Flashsideways (or some-even-stranger-ways) to an imaginary, 4th-dimensional picnic in which Rex, Weed, and Prairie "negotiate an agreeable version of history." This is an important little scene, since it's where the details of the murder are made explicit at last. Or are they? Note the "nearly" in "he nearly blew me away," which seems to suggest that maybe Weed is merely wounded? (It's just Pynchonian smoke; Weed really is killed.) This scene appears to be Rex's fantasy -- except how does he know about Prairie?

p. 236 "...he reached for the Tube, popped it on, fastened himself to the screen and began to feed."   A great William Burroughs-style science-fictional, Tube/addictive image. 

p. 236 "It's takin his soul, man"    Certain primitive (and not so primitive) tribes believe that when someone takes your photograph it steals your soul. Or maybe Howie means the Tube.

p. 236 "Culito Canyon" = Spanish for "Little Ass Canyon."

p. 237 "...might make the Guinness Book someday..."   The Guinness Book of Records, published regularly by the Irish brewery/distillery company, chronicles current achievements in urban sports like phone booth stuffing.

p. 238 "Famous worms of song"    A play on "The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play pinochle on your snout," sung to Mozart/Haydn/whoever's requiem. A famous childhood song, right up there with "Great green gobs of greasy grimy monkeymeat," "Hitler he had just one big ball," and the tragic ballad "Found a Peanut." This is kind of a heavy Pynchon hit on Frenesi's knowledge of Weed's impending doom.


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